Milton's pamphlet Areopagitica called for free political discussion. No one person has access to truth. (Leaders who say they own truth are usually tyrants and should not be trusted.) Listening to each other in the free commonwealth of ideas may lead to better understanding and more effective action.

It's rapidly becoming impossible to obey the law. Taking a snapshot of a tourist site may turn out to be illegal. More seriously, what would happen if a member of the public witnessed a police officer commiting a crime or abusing police powers and tried to document this by taking a picture? A ban on photographing the police adds to police powers and makes it easier for rogue officers - or rogue forces - to break the law, suppress the evidence and punish the witnesses. This should not be possible in a free, democratic society.Soon pictures like this will be illegal. Although the police are concealing neither their faces nor their weapons, we're told that taking their pictures may put them at risk.

Perhaps I'm old-fashioned. I grew up with a police force that rarely carried weapons, in the days before tasers had been invented. Nowadays even police without guns carry an arsenal of alternative weapons strung about their waists. We've come a long way from Dixon of Dock Green and the respect given to a friendly neighbourhood bobby.

I know Dixon was a fiction but the myth gave good policemen a kind of gentle authority. Dixon's salute at the end of each episode as he bade goodbye to the audience with the phrase, "Evening, all," suggested a police force that worked with and respected the public. Big guns, tasers and laws that threaten our freedom don't make me feel that the police respect me. They don't make me feel safer. They make me feel afraid.

1 Comments:

The truth about Ian Tomlinson's death would not have emerged but for a video of a kind which this new legislation is designed to deter. It may or may not protect the goivernment against terrorists but it will certainly protect it against demonstrators.